


china town

by mothicalcreatures (laelreenia)



Series: Demons and Detectives [4]
Category: Pet Shop of Horrors
Genre: Ambiguous Time Frame, Gen, Leon goes looking for D
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-06 08:16:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14637804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laelreenia/pseuds/mothicalcreatures
Summary: While looking for D after his disappearance Leon comes to terms with his position as a former police officer in relationship to the history of the police’s presence in Chinatown and his desire to do things differently than Vesca.





	china town

**Author's Note:**

> Parts in italics are flashbacks.

 

_Jill leaned over on Leon’s desk. “You know barging around Chinatown looking for something to accuse Count D of makes you look racist, right? Especially considering the long history of over policing and cops being extra shitty in Chinatown. Did you know that police officers used to work as tour guides, to show white tourists around Chinatown for the spectacle of it?”_

_“I have evidence,” Leon retorted._

_“Circumstantial evidence,” Jill shot back. “Count D has one of the best pet shops in the area. People also die in a variety of tragic ways. Working in the jurisdiction we do, means that there’s probably significant overlap between Count D’s customers and the victims we see, just based on the fact that they live in the same area. Correlation is not causation.”_

_Leon huffed._

_“Besides,” Jill continued. “I don’t think you’re dumb enough to let a man you genuinely think is a criminal babysit your little brother.”_

 

When Leon quit the force to start his search for D, the first place he’d looked was San Francisco’s Chinatown, followed by New York’s Chinatown, and then Washington DC’s. No new pet shops, no Count D. Throughout Leon had begun the ordeal of trying to teach himself Chinese. Part of him wondered if D hadn’t headed back to China to disappear into the Kunlun Mountains. Of course, all of Leon’s research suggested that trying to search the Kunlun Mountains without a team was a fools errand, still going to China wouldn’t hurt.

 

_Jill stood arms crossed as she watched Leon clearing out his desk. “You really are quitting. I thought your life’s mission was to bring in Count D?”_

_Leon sighed, dropping a box of papers on his desk. “I’m not going to do what Vesca did looking for D’s father. I’m not going after D as a cop. I have something to give back to him is all.”_

_“That doesn’t mean you need to quit the force,”Jill said._

_“Yeah, it does,” Leon replied. “You were right about D. He wasn’t involved in any of that shit I’d thought he was. Vesca was wrong too. So I have apologies to make, and I’m not going to do that by being a cop hunting down D.”_

 

A year or so of practice and study and saw Leon’s Chinese was fine in large metropolitan areas in China, but the more rural he got the more dialectical the language got and the less Leon could understand and be understood. He wouldn’t have been able to talk to the people living on the Kunlun Mountain range even if he’d encountered them while driving through. Leon didn’t have the skill to go off road searching for D, he wasn’t a mountain climber and the mountain range was just to big to have any solo searching be effective. And the more Leon thought about it, D didn’t strike him as the type for the nomadic lifestyle anyway. So Leon headed back through China, finishing his trip with stops in Beijing, Shanghai, and then Hong Kong. But no knew leads on D surfaced so with nothing more to keep him in China, Leon headed back stateside.

 

_“Your friend said he was moving to Chinatown?”the man asked._

_Leon rubbed the back of his neck a bit sheepishly.“Well, sort of. He did say he was moving to Chinatown, he just, uh, didn’t say where the Chinatown was.”_

_At the man’s look of confusion Leon continued. “He didn’t say what state he was moving too. So I’ve just been visiting every Chinatown I can find hoping I’ll hit the right one eventually.”_

_“It sounds like you_ friend _didn’t want you to find him.”_

_Leon grimaced, remembering the way that D had pushed him off that ship, saying that he couldn’t be there._

_The man’s expression shifted to one of suspicion at Leon’s silence. “If you’re a police officer I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”_

_“I’m not,” Leon’s answer was probably to quick, he realized. “I mean, I’m not anymore. I used to be. I quit the force.”_

_The man nodded. “I have not seen your friend around, and as far as I know, no new pet shops have opened recently.”_

 

Pennsylvania, Boston, Chicago. Leon got a job writing travel essays to make money. He was more aware now, of his relationship as a white ex-cop to any Chinatown and he tried to write about things that weren’t Chinatown, but often, because he spent so much time looking around various Chinatowns, that was what he had the most information to write about. He delivered two stories a month, making sure he didn’t write about the Chinatown he was currently searching in until after he’d left.

Honolulu, Seattle, Houston. Leon wrote under a pseudonym so that maybe D wouldn’t realize it was him hopping Chinatown to Chinatown and Leon could catch him by surprise. He found himself lingering longer and longer in each Chinatown even after he’d confirmed that D wasn’t there. 

Paris, Berlin, Hamburg. With no luck in the States Leon switched continents, to much of the same luck. No D. In Paris Leon found that a pet shop _had_ opened up in a Chinatown there, but it hadn’t been open for long, and Leon wasn’t able to get any description of the owner. In Berlin and Hamburg he found older people who had known Grandpa D, but that wasn’t the D he was looking for.

Milan, London, Madrid. Leon kept Chris’s drawing in a flat envelope kept safely in the bottom of his suitcase. In Madrid Leon met a man who knew a Count D, but after a few questions Leon realized that the man had known D’s father, not his D. There had been no such luck in Milan or London.

 

Lyon.

 

Leon quit his writing job after Madrid and returned to France. The pet shop opening, however, briefly, in the Bellville, Paris Chinatown, wouldn’t leave Leon’s head. He didn’t head back to Paris however, instead ending his trip in Lyon.

Leon wasn’t really expecting to find D there. He was stopping in Lyon because Lyon was as far as he got before his money ran out. Leon was, frankly, ready to give up looking in Chinatowns, having come up with so little useful information. Still having been a police officer might have made things easier if he could have talked with local police forces, but that felt too underhanded to Leon.

It was all the more of a shock then, to be walking down a Chinatown street in Lyon and see a sign that said, “Animalerie du comte D.”

Leon had to rub at his eyes to make sure he was seeing things right, but when he was sure that he _was_ reading the sign right, he threw open the door and barged right in.

**Author's Note:**

> Since this was written for an assignment, it means there is research and a bibliography behind it, so if anyone is interested in said research here you go.
> 
> Allan, Nigel John Roger, and Vasily Mikhaylovich Sinitsyn. “Kunlun Mountains.” _Encyclopædia Britannica_ , Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 6 Mar. 2017, www.britannica.com/place/Kunlun-Mountains.  
> Berglund, Barbara. “Chinatown’s Tourist Terrain: Representation and Recialization in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco.” _American Studies_ , vol. 46, no. 2, 2005, pp. 5-36. _JSTOR_ , JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40643847.  
> King, Homay. _Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier._ Duke University Press, 2010.  
>  Kirk, Kamala. “The 10 Best Chinatowns in the United States.” _Tripping_ , Tripping, 15 June 2017, www.tripping.com/explore/the-10-best-chinatowns-in-the-united-states.


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